Jerry Bannister [Ed. This essay is cross-posted with our partners at the Acadiensis blog.] Nations matter. National cultures matter. And national histories matter. As we try to understand what has happened in the United States, we should keep those three things in mind. There will be endless discussion of all the proximate causes of Donald Trump’s victory… Continue Reading
Latest in: Early American History
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Patrick Lacroix “The President also desires me to assure Lord Durham, ‘in the strongest manner’, of his sincere desire to do all in his power to keep up a good understanding between the two Countries.”[1] So wrote British emissary Sir Charles Grey (the son of a British prime minister and father of a Canadian governor… Continue Reading
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Aaron Willis The relationship between Britain and supranational structures has consistently raised questions of authority and sovereignty. While the E.U. has provided the most recent theatre for debates over these political concepts, in the eighteenth century it was the expanding empire that generated political crises and the attendant debates. The concept of sovereignty, often in… Continue Reading
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Loren Michael Mortimer In September of 1759, great armies were on the move through the upper St. Lawrence Valley. Not the military forces under the command of Montcalm and Wolfe en-route to their climactic showdown on the Plains of Abraham, but an army of black bears migrating en-masse southward from Canada into Britain’s Atlantic colonies.… Continue Reading
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Adam Nadeau Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015) Michael A. McDonnell’s Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America is a wonderfully researched microhistory of the Michilimackinac area from the mid-17th to the early 19th century. Situated around the Mackinaw… Continue Reading
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dann j. Broyld & Matthew Warshauer Note: This essay, with its cross-border themes, is being jointly posted by Borealia and The Republic, the new blog of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). Borealia is grateful for The Republic’s support and cooperation! The net has been abuzz with news of United States… Continue Reading
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Stephanie Pettigrew The 42nd annual French Colonial Historical Society conference was held in Ottawa from May 19 to 21, 2016. I was first introduced to this society the summer just before starting my PhD studies, when the conference was at the Fortress of Louisbourg. There I learned that the FCHS is, first and foremost, a… Continue Reading
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Colin M. Coates Some species are better to “think” with than others. Environmental activists often draw attention to their causes through reference to “flagship” or “charismatic” species. Invocations of the threatened habitat of the marbled murrelet helped galvanize opposition to logging in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, just as the Kermode bear subspecies has… Continue Reading
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Robert Englebert Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). I recently had an opportunity to discuss Robert Michael Morrissey’s new book Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country with my senior level seminar on French-Indigenous relations in colonial… Continue Reading
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Douglas Hunter The Vikings are back in North America, athough in truth they’ve been with us since at least the eighteenth century, when the Vinland sagas began to fuel speculation about the lands Leif Eiriksson and his compatriots tried to colonize around 1000 AD. Their latest sighting is at Point Rosee in southwestern Newfoundland, where… Continue Reading
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